We audited our own data, and three quarters of it was not what it claimed
What is actually inside the datasets that everyone quotes?
Our political trading feed holds 5,000 rows. Only 1,190 are stock trades. Three quarters are bonds and other instruments, and 3,972 of the 5,000 rows belong to a single filer. Any headline built on the raw table would have described one person's bond ladder and called it Congress.
What is actually inside a 'political stock trading' dataset
This is our own feed, audited before we published anything from it. Three quarters of the rows are not stock trades, and four fifths belong to a single filer. Any headline built on the raw table would have described one person's bond ladder and called it Congress.
| What we checked | What we found |
|---|---|
| Political disclosures, raw rows | 8125 |
| Of which resolve to a listed equity | 4245 |
| Of which are bonds or other non-equity | 3880 |
| Share that is NOT stock trading | 47.8% |
| Rows belonging to a single filer | 5023 |
| Distinct filers in the equity set | 89 |
| 13F holdings rows | 438833 |
| 13F rows with a ticker in the raw feed | 0 |
| 13F rows resolvable via CUSIP map | 414994 |
| Quarters in the 13F feed | 22 |
| Quarters with usable coverage (>50 funds) | 2 |
| Funds in the latest usable quarter | 148 |
Live from our database. 12 rows shown.
- We profiled every dataset before writing a word: row counts, date ranges, null rates, and how much of the data is dominated by a single entity.
- Everything on this page is a query against our live database, run when you loaded it.
- This is an audit of OUR data, not a claim about anybody else's. Other providers may have cleaner feeds, and we would like to think they have run this check too.
- The 13F feed nominally spans seven quarters. Only two have real coverage. Publishing a 'three year trend' from it would have been fiction, and we were one query away from doing exactly that.
Free to quote, chart or republish with attribution. Cite as: SteadyShares, We audited our own data, and three quarters of it was not what it claimed, https://steadyshares.com/research/we-audited-our-own-data. If you are a journalist and want the underlying query or a different cut of the data, ask and we will run it.
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Educational information, not financial advice, and not a recommendation to buy or sell anything. A late regulatory filing is a paperwork failure and nothing more: we make no allegation of wrongdoing against any person named on this page.